Six Ways Flash Is Changing the Storage Landscape

Eradicating Costly Workarounds

Because traditional spinning drives are relatively slow compared to processors and networks, over the years, the industry has come up with techniques to overcome that limitation. In a workaround known as "short stroking," only a fraction of a storage system's spinning drives are actually used to hold data while the rest sit idle. As a result, the heads don't have to move very far to access the data, and the underutilized drives operate more efficiently, all of which improves performance. Perhaps not surprisingly, short stroking comes with a steep cost premium, because more capacity is purchased than is actually ever used, and flash-based storage eliminates the need for short stroking altogether, improving ROI for customers previously using this workaround dramatically.

If your organization is thinking about storage, now may be the perfect time for you to give flash-based storage a look. For some time now, organizations that have needed the fastest possible access to data, such as trading floors, have turned to flash-based storage systems. Without a doubt, the performance advantages provided by flash far outpace those provided by other traditional methods of storage. Unfortunately, the cost of flash storage has, up to this point, been a major hurdle to wider adoption.

Today, however, the industry is beginning to change and the flash technology that once made sense only when extreme high performance was required is now a real possibility for general use in mid-sized to large companies. To help organizations determine if flash might be the right solution for their companies, Logicalis US has outlined six ways flash storage is changing the storage landscape.

"The storage market is going through a paradigm shift," says Samad Ali, vice president and general manager, HP Solutions, Logicalis US. "At the June 2014 Discover conference, for example, one of our customers was briefed on the new HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450 solid-state disk array. He had been considering purchasing disk-based storage from HP, but the value proposition of the HP 7450 array was so compelling that he changed his mind on the spot, moving forward with an all solid-state array for his general-purpose applications. The HP 7450 all-flash array offers 99.9999 percent availability and carries a five-year warranty all at a price point near that of disk-based storage."

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